Right answers

There were so many good questions, and interesting remarks in the last post, here is an attempt to come up with some answers. The very first is the one that sets my teeth on edge. Buy/sell. What is it at an art show?

Have you ever been at a local show and seen someone come by with just the cutest thing they'd purchased. And then you saw more and more people with the same object, then you saw the booth where you could buy them. Probably an earnest young couple, one in the back making more and one at the street side, selling, with stock piled half way up the outside of the booth, if "it" happened to be big.

Do you remember garden sculptures made of old garden tools? Or watering fountains and sprinklers made of copper tubing. Someone somewhere probably fashioned the first, but by season's end they had become "buy/sell", popular in garden stores. By the next season they were in WallMart. 

These operatives bought container loads of stock, and even sent operatives out to half a dozen shows a weekend. When shabby chic first came around, it probably began at craft shows. I once exhibited next to a young woman with a booth of battered watering cans, painted, and interesting three pronged trowels, chattering with customers about scouring the back roads of New York for these items. During one long break in the action, I became aware of her on the phone with someone, laughing that her husband was in China as they spoke, sourcing another container.

Those of us who honestly produced our craft cringed at the sight of buy/sell that got past the sponsor of the show. We generally asked the buy/sell exhibitor not be invited back next year, and they were not, but there were two more to fill the shoes.

About the plastic barrier on my window: this morning I scrunched down in bed, waiting for the alarm to ring, and listened to the sparrows calling. I could hear them, a bit muffled. They are loud and noisy fellows.

I bought a Roomba, probably ten or twelve years ago. It was the first year I thought it just past prohibitively expensive. They still weren't advertising on TV, just in magazines. I think I paid almost four hundred dollars for the machine. But, you could sit in our living room at any time and watch animal hair floating. I thought it would be a good investment. It was a family Christmas extravaganza.

Every room on the ground floor level had a hard surface, wood or tile. There was a minute step up between the wood and tile surfaces; the Roomba could go down, but needed a boost up. Watching the little fellow work was more entertaining than TV, and we even set it to business for guests.

And then it quit working. Emptying the dirt reservoirs made no change. Reading deep in the instructions, there was much more to be cleaned. In essence, the thing had to be disassembled. Much cleaning was involved. It was beyond the interest of any of the family it was purchased for, and beyond the skill of the person who bought it. I gave it to an engineer friend to learn about how it navigated.

And finally, what is a Bazingo? It is a tool I bought from a wood worker friend at a show, and brought home for my brother-in-law. It had a different name, that I don't remember. The wood worker moaned that every man he sold one to probably went home and made a dozen. I said that's exactly what I knew Tom would do.

The original name was lost in translation, and Tom christened it Bazingo. It is the best back scratcher I've ever known. It hung in the kitchen in the old house, by the Hoosier.